Enterprises are continuously looking for ways to provide quality service to their customers while at the same time minimizing their customer service operations costs. In response to these concerns, many businesses have utilized Self Care Systems (SCSs), which are computerized systems which allow a customer interaction, such as the reporting of a problem with an existing service, to be performed in an automated manner. In order to increase the effectiveness of SCSs, many businesses utilize SCSs which have the ability to understand and make natural language statements, that is, to understand and make declarations or remarks in a human language such as English, French or Japanese, rather than requiring a customer to utilize a more artificial interface such as a touch tone menu system. Thus, when a call is received, the SCS generally begins the interaction by playing a prompt, which is an audio sequence requesting information from the customer, such as “How may I help you?” The interaction then continues with the customer making a series of statements, which are natural language communications that supply information or make requests, and the SCS playing a series of prompts until the interaction is complete.
While these SCSs are functional, they suffer from a number of weaknesses. While automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU) software have reached a high level of sophistication, word recognition and context recognition are not perfect. This can lead to an SCS repeatedly prompting a customer for more information. This may cause frustration on the part of the customer, lead to a greater number of abandoned calls, and, potentially, lose revenue.
Because of technological deficiencies, many businesses supplement SCSs with assisted care systems (ACSs). These are systems that allow customers to interact directly with human agents. One type of system, in which an SCS is often supplemented with an ACS, is an interactive voice response (IVR) system. IVR systems interact with callers using natural language. However, augmenting SCSs with ACSs can lead to additional problems. For example, some SCSs prematurely transfer calls to ACSs. This may lead to increased costs associated with running the ACS. Even more troublesome are situations where an SCS is supplemented by an ACS which is made up of multiple agent groups, that is, by groups of one or more human operators with special training to process certain types of interactions. This creates the potential for an SCS to transfer a customer to an agent group which is not properly trained to process that customer's requests. An agent within the agent group is then required to assess the customer's needs and transfer the agent to a different group. Such improper transfers result in customer frustration and increase the costs of maintaining the ACS.
In addition to the above weaknesses, SCSs do not include any mechanism for automatically updating the software they use for processing natural language interactions. Thus, even if a particular type of statement is identified as particularly likely to result in a misdirected transfer, or in an unnecessary request for additional information, it would still be necessary to undertake a cumbersome manual update process in order to improve the SCS performance.
Certain embodiments of the present invention are designed to provide a solution to certain of the weaknesses set forth above.